Presence and Representing

APPROACHING TRUTH
I have finally set myself to making some work for Sojourner Truth. Now, because over the course of two weeks at the Female Power hut at Eastern Market there have been at least four different people asking, Where is Sojourner Truth? One of these people was a filmmaker who made a documentary about Sojourner Truth (to be released in 2023). 

Sojourner Truth was a charismatic orator whose imposing presence and way of speaking made a strong impression on those who experienced her. Remembering her meeting with Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe likened her to a sibyl, or ancient prophetess. Truth never learned to read or write, and every text we have of hers is mediated by other writers. Her power is her presence and her voice, the literal voice that disperses as sound. These factors made it hard for me to imagine how transformative she could be and I think that’s why it took me a while to turn my attention her.

The thing that fired me up is this photo I found of Truth. I could see right away that this was a creation of a master representer. She has a photo of her grandson on her lap. This is a photograph that includes a photograph, and now I have made an image out of the pixels I downloaded from the Library of Congress representing this photograph of a photograph. If you are reading this online, you are looking at pixels representing an image based on pixels representing a photograph of a photograph. 

The photo of Sojourner Truth is an example of a carte de visite, or visiting card, which was handed out to acquaintances and pasted into scrap books and albums. These inexpensive photographs exploded in popularity during this time in the US. This was especially the case during the war, since so many people were separated from those they loved. The intimate photos maintained connection and presence across distances, and also through time, fixing the image of a person at a particular state. However, the photo on Truth’s lap is a more permanent and expensive one, the kind intended to last.

On her lap is a tintype or a daguerreotype of Truth’s grandson, James Caldwell, who was a soldier in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, one of two African-American regiments organized to fight for the Union during the US Civil War. Truth worked to recruit black men to fight in the war to end slavery. She was hugely proud of this grandson and she wished that she herself could fight in the war. In this photograph she is taking possession of her grandson and his acts, and re-presenting them to us.

Sojourner Truth sat for “at least twenty-eight different photographs, mostly cartes de visite, deriving from perhaps fourteen different sessions with a half dozen or so photographers,” writes Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in Enduring Truths. And they keep turning up in personal archives. Truth printed her copyright on the back, something that was rare at the time, as usually it was the photographer who claimed the rights to an image. She also had printed at the bottom on the card, “I sell the Shadow to support the Substance.” Sojourner Truth sold images of herself to make money. She claimed ownership of her self such that she could sell representations of her self. She constructed and she controlled this representation.

In the introduction by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith to Pictures and Progress, they write of the chapter on Sojourner Truth written by Augusta Rohrbach:
“For Sojourner Truth … photography was part of a broader set of self-representational strategies she used to claim an authorized voice and an audience for her work. Augusta Rohrbach examines the ways in which the famous orator crafted her photographic portraits to signal self-possession. Rohrbach shows how Truth utilized the photograph to claim her embodied presence for an audience, a presence she also celebrated in her commitment to orality over print culture. As Truth promoted herself through print, and through the writing of others, she announced her ultimate control over those representations by marking her presence in photographs. However, as she drew upon the indexicality of the photograph to mark her presence, she also cannily manipulated the pose to produce a persona, playing with both the constructed nature of the photograph and its associations with unmediated representation. According to Rohrbach, Truth utilized a variety of representational forms to create a marketable persona over the course of her life, but her self-fashioning is most evident in her photographic portraits and her shrewd use of the photograph’s varied cultural meaning and power.”

SOMETHING SHE SAID
There is a lot to say about Sojourner Truth’s most famous speech, delivered on May 29, 1851, in Akron Ohio. It is mostly transcribed in the newspaper, Anti-slavery Bugle, of June 21 (“I am a woman’s rights.”) It was changed considerably (“And a’n’t I a woman?”) by Frances Gage and published in 1882 in History of Woman Suffrage. The first transcription is thought to be the most authentic. 

I was always getting stuck on the first point, when she says “I am a woman’s rights.” It just didn’t make sense to me, almost like it wasn’t really in English. How can you be “rights” since they aren’t something you are, they are something you have. They are a potential. After this statement, Truth talks about how she can do the same work as any man: she’s talking about physical labor. 

It occurred to me that she may have meant “power,” which is, after all, related to rights. You likely don’t have the legitimized power to do something if you don’t have the right to do that thing. So if she’s saying, “I am a woman’s power” it makes sense that she would talk about the physical power she has, and other things, that make her as good as any man.

Furthermore, what does it mean for a Black woman, a former enslaved person, to say to a gathering of mostly white women, “I am a woman’s power”? I don’t think it means what is said in the later rewrite, that goes: “A’n’t I a woman?” That later version implies that Truth is asking to be included in the white women’s fight, to get the rights and privileges that white women have and will yet receive. That she is worthy to be included. As if they will represent her. But I propose that the first (more authentic version) implies that Truth is representing them, and their potential for strength, for power. She is presenting her self and her story to be a model for them. But I’m not sure her audience knew how to hear that. To them she becomes a magical “other,” a sibyl.  Even if Truth was not saying that (how can we be sure—we weren’t there) that is what I am hearing now. That the multiply-marginalized Sojourner Truth represents the power of all women, that she is a model for me. We know how to hear that now.

Her physical presence and her speech have perished, but her autobiographical stories and her carefully constructed photographs persist. As Suzanne P. Fitch and Roseann Mandziuk write in Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story, and Song
“[T]he power of Truth’s rhetoric came from her successful construction of an autobiographical character that coincided precisely with what audiences actually saw when she spoke before them. In her unadorned dress and turban, with her strong voice and haunting singing, Truth challenged audiences to consider the worth of herself and her experience. She asked them to broaden their perspectives, to mend their ways, and to be God’s servants in order to ensure justice and equality. She was not afraid to speak forthrightly and to answer a heckler with a stern admonition or to profess her faith and values through the performance of a song. In all, her narratives and her personal character blended seamlessly, such that Truth herself understood the correspondence and its persuasive force: ‘I will shake every place I go to.’ …
…she entreated women to be bold and assertive: ‘Be strong women! blush not! tremble not!’ Truth often implied that if women wanted their rights, they should just take them, rather than beg men for them.”

BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE

She was born enslaved, perhaps in 1797. Her original name was Isabella Baumfree. She was born and grew up in upstate New York.

She spoke Dutch as her first language, and although she later learned to speak English, she always spoke with a Dutch accent.

She never learned to read and write.

She was probably thirteen years old when she was sold by her first enslaver in 1810 for a hundred dollars (sheep were included in the sale) and separated from her parents.

She was beaten as a slave; she also lost a portion of her right index finger in a field accident. There are implications in her accounts that she was raped while she was enslaved.

She bore five children between 1815 and 1826, one of whom died.

She walked away from her last enslaver in 1826, at the age of thirty, after completing work that she felt she owed him, although he reneged on his promise to free her after she completed the work. Her freedom, and that of her babe-in-arms, was bought by the Quaker family who were sheltering her.

She felt a call to be a preacher, and participated in religious communities and preaching circuits during a time of great religious ferment in Western New York as part of the “Second Great Awakening” in a region later called the “Burned-over district” (set ablaze with religious fervor). 

She renamed herself Sojourner Truth in 1843 at the age of forty-six.

She chose to go to court three times and won all three cases. In 1828 she litigated to recover her son Peter who had been illegally sold into slavery. In 1832 she filed a slander suit. In 1865 she brought assault charges against a Washington, DC, streetcar conductor who tried to throw her off his car; he was dismissed from his job.

She wrote an autobiography with the help of two different women friends and paid for its first printing in 1850 on credit; she reissued the book in 1875, 1878, and 1881.

She campaigned on behalf of the abolition of slavery, the right of African Americans and women to vote, the right of emancipated slaves to education and property, the desegregation of streetcars, and the elimination of capital punishment.

She was a moving speaker. According to a Quaker abolitionist, she “poured forth a torrent of natural eloquence which swept everything before it.” A large part of her effectiveness was her physical presence: she was very tall and thin, and she had long bony fingers that she would point with rhetorical power. We do not have definite texts of her speeches because they appear to have been improvised, but we do have transcriptions and reports.

Her most famous speech was delivered on May 29, 1851, in Akron Ohio. It is mostly transcribed in the newspaper, Anti-slavery Bugle, of June 21 (‘I am a woman’s rights.”) It was changed considerably (“And a’n’t I a woman?”) by Frances Gage and published in 1882 in History of Woman Suffrage. This later publication has Truth’s voice rendered in a “Southern Colored” slang that is an inaccurate representation of the way Truth likely spoke.

She worked tirelessly from 1864 to 1867 on behalf of the thousands of emancipated Southern slaves refuged at the Freedmen’s Village in Washington, DC.

She filed petitions with Congress and paid to have petitions printed.

She tried to vote several times in advance of female suffrage, but was turned away from the polls.

She posed for photographic portraits, primarily cartes de visite, at least eleven different times, mostly during the years of the Civil War when she was in her late sixties, but also in the years immediately prior to her death in 1883.

She had a copyright filed in her name for her cartes de visite in 1864, which was unprecedented for a portrait sitter: usually copyrights were filed in the name of the photographer. The copyright appeared on the backs of her portraits; at the same time, she added her name and a caption to the front, “I sell the Shadow to support the Substance.” She sold her photographs at her lectures and through the mail in order to support herself.

She died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, November 26, 1883.

SOURCES
Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story, and Song (Great American Orators) by Suzanne P. Fitch, Roseann Mandziuk

Enduring Truths by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Pictures and Progress edited by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith 

https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/resources

https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2021/04/sojourner-truths-most-famous-speech/

https://bampfa.org/program/sojourner-truth-photography-and-fight-against-slavery